“I did not mean to make away with the child, I did not know what I was about”: Autobiographical Traces of Infanticide in Eighteenth-Century Trial Records
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, I am interested in the possibilities of maternal autobiography in court documents. I focus specifically on the trial records of mothers charged with infanticide between 1700 and 1800. Drawing on the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913, I consider these narratives both through the lenses of legal and social histories of infanticide, and in relation to Marlene Kadar et al.’s notion of “autobiographical traces,” fragmentary stories that emerge when pieces of individual lives are stitched together with the historical, social and political context in which they emerged. The fragments I explore in this essay include not only the limited textual interventions of the accused mothers themselves, as they took the stand to speak in their defense, but also their silences and erasures. In addition to this, I consider the autobiographical potential of these women’s actions and behaviours, as witnessed and deposed by those called to the stand. Finally, I consider the stories of self that emerge from the reproductive and maternal body; that is, I am interested in the ways that bodily stories and understandings inevitably complicate textual and behavioural narratives. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on 15 September 2014 and published on 25 June 2015.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it